


Talk It Through For Me

by psocoptera



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Crushes, M/M, Study Buddies, academic anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5158661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hey," Ransom says, "Come sit with me at my table, maybe we can figure it out."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Talk It Through For Me

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to alyssakate, for organizing this nifty fanzine, and to rhubarbpie for beta reading!

Ransom's gonna die, and the last thing he's going to see on this earth is going to be a Fourier transform.

This is usually where Holster would lean over and say something comforting about hockey, or kegsters, or his need for a mall run or whatever: something that reminds Ransom that there is life outside of his major, and he will continue to exist as a person even if he gets kicked out of this crystallography seminar for being a stupid undergrad biologist and not, like, a math genius who occasionally says the word "protein" to trick biologists into thinking they have any hope of understanding this shit.

The problem is that Holster's in Founders doing this giant group project for his Urban Underclass seminar, and this stupid fucking workbook is on reserve here at Carnegie-Choate, and this semester they're, like, two fucking households both alike in dignity, or some shit like that. Or, well, maybe not that bad, they see each other all the time at practice, and on the bus, and they sleep in the same room for fuck's sake. It's just actual study time they're having a hard time making overlap, and Ransom's own fault that his study habits have crystallized around Holster. So to speak.

Ugh. Okay. He's not focusing. Maybe a break, a quick lap around the second floor, here. A walk outside would be even better but he's got an hour left on his reserve.

He's briskly passing the carrels on the far side of the floor when he realizes that the guy sitting in one of them, banging his forehead against the table, is Dex.

Ransom might not be captain, and Dex might not be a frog any more, but he's pretty sure that as a senior, he's still supposed to worry about his younger teammates trying to give themselves head injuries.

"Hey, sup," he says, and Dex lifts his head and gives him a look that's somewhere between despair and murder.

"This data structures class is going to kill me," he snarls. "It's a prereq for everything else, and the homework is just nonsense, like, I swear the same word means a different thing in the next sentence, argh!"

A head pops up from the next carrel down, looking unamused. "Can you keep it down?" she hisses.

"Hey," Ransom says, "Come sit with me at my table, maybe we can figure it out."

Dex frowns, but picks up his laptop and bag and follows Ransom.

"Wait, are you, like, bioinformatics bio?" he asks, plopping down next to Ransom's books and papers and multicolored pens. "You actually get this stuff?"

"Nope," Ransom says, "But, look, just talk it through for me, maybe we can figure out what the words mean at least. Any chance there's an actual typo?"

"A typo?" Dex makes a face. "If I've been banging my head over a _typo_ \- "

"The worst," Ransom agrees.

Dex gets three minutes into a monologue Ransom isn't following at all before his eyebrows go up, he interrupts himself to say, "oh, oh - motherfucker!" and starts typing madly.

It kind of gives Ransom a warm glow. Not a glow that sheds any light on the Fourier transforms, alas, but he feels less like he's going to die here in the science library. It's even nicer when Dex looks up a while later and says, "I got it!"

"Yeah?" Ransom asks.

"That problem," Dex clarifies, shrugging a little. "Should I, uh, go back to a different table? I know you have your system."

"My system is shit," Ransom says, scowling at the crystallography workbook. "You might as well not bother to move."

Dex frowns. "It sounds like I owe you one," he says. "So - your turn? See if you can explain it to me?"

He's a surprisingly good listener - he asks more questions than Ransom had, and he makes this hilariously serious paying-attention face like Ransom is Coach Hall or something. Ransom doesn't think he's really getting anywhere, and then on their walk back to the Haus, once they've both given up for the night, he starts thinking about the splotchy shadows on the sidewalk where the light from the light posts is coming through the trees, and, wait, that's maybe the same thing as crystal structures? Sort of? It's enough to make him grin over at Dex, anyways, who blinks at him a little, then smiles back.

*

After that it's a thing, a regular study arrangement, and more often than not one of them will notice that the other one is stabbing their notebook with a pencil (Dex) or sitting there frozen (Ransom) and suggest they talk it through. Ransom's work has gotten much easier now that the class is focusing on the practicalities of growing crystals - this is the kind of stuff he likes, specifics about what he would actually plan to do at a bench with little trays of hanging drops - but he still gets stuck sometimes, and Dex gets angry a lot.

"Can I ask you something?" Ransom asks, after a particularly intense rant about hash tables. "Do you actually like this stuff?"

Dex scratches the side of his nose. "Nursey asked me that once," he says. "Do I love it the way he loves words." He rolls his eyes a little, but it seems more fond than dismissive. "I don't? I love the idea of having a job though."

"You never thought about going pro?"

"Of course I thought about it," Dex says, snorting. "I could probably get an ECHL contract, yeah, but that's - fine to live on, but not set-you-up-for-retirement money. Ten years of that and now I'm thirty-whatever with no experience? Lobster for the rest of my life." He shakes his head.

Ransom nods; he loves the ice, but there's something comforting about the idea of all those biotech companies in Toronto.

"Holster's going for it," he says. "AHL? We talked about trying together, but... yeah."

"Yeah," Dex agrees, and it's kind of stupidly nice, talking to someone who just gets it. Sometimes it seems like everyone on the team has always either been definitely going for it (Jack, Holster) or definitely not (Shitty, Bitty, Lardo obviously), but here's Dex in the same geek-career-vs-jock-career boat.

*

They end up sitting next to each other on the bus, once, Holster wanting to sleep and Nursey in the middle of something with Chowder. It's one of those cold but very sunny days and the window is bright behind Dex the whole way down the Pike. The light makes his ears glow, bright pink, and Ransom maybe notices more than he should. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Dex is, like, frowning very determinedly at a textbook, and Ransom is supposed to be reading an article: he should not be thinking about putting his teammate's ears in his mouth.

*

He kind of keeps noticing, though. Dex will crumple up a piece of paper and Ransom will notice his hands, or the light will catch in his weirdly golden eyes and - yeah. He tells himself he's just watching for stress, those little signs of rage and frustration indicating that Dex is about to lose his shit with computer science if Ransom doesn't intervene, but, no, he's pretty fond of the guy even when he's not about to flip out.

"Hey," Ransom says, when he thinks the air over Dex's ears might actually start to steam. "Talk it through for me?" And Dex does, and usually makes some progress, and Ransom doesn't feel quite so useless and hopeless, and makes some progress himself, and sometimes he tells Dex something interesting, the galvanized bucket story, or how they don't let undergrads in the X-ray lab any more since that one kid lost a finger.

"Is it weird that we don't talk about hockey?" Dex asks one time.

"We had practice this morning and a bus ride tomorrow," Ransom says.

"But, like, here."

"What, in the science library?" Ransom says. "Quit stalling and debug your... thing."

Dex grins so unrepentantly that Ransom has to look away.

*

"Ha!" Ransom says. "Powerpoint complete."

"Hm?" Dex says, chewing on a pen and still typing.

"This presentation," Ransom says. "I think it's done, and it's, like, not even midnight."

Dex takes the pen out of his mouth "Nice," he says. "You should practice it on me."

Ransom looks around the rows of tables. "Here?"

"Third floor study room," Dex says, closing his laptop. "Come on."

Ransom trails after him, blinking a little. It's not a bad idea, he's been going over it in his head but it's always a little different doing it out loud. He's a little surprised Dex is so eager to drop his own work to help him, but then, this is Dex who spent countless hours last year fiddling with the old oven for Bitty, who tries to make sure Chowder never has to touch pucks and who's taken over from Shitty as Lardo's emergency sequin-gluing partner.

Also the last time Ransom was in one of the third floor study rooms, he was hooking up with his neurobio lab partner - actually the last three times - but obviously Dex isn't thinking anything like that. So Ransom really needs to get that out of his mind right now. Purely academics here. He doesn't even check out Dex's butt following him up the stairs. Much.

There's an awkward moment in the room when Ransom shuts the door and turns and Dex is, like, still right there, but Ransom has phenomenal reflexes, thank you, so he just sort of catches himself and spins and they get themselves sorted out at the table. Ransom is genuinely happy to talk about the crystal structure of the 50S subunit - the ribosome is fucking boss - and Dex seems to be genuinely happy to listen.

"I like the exit tunnel thing," he says at the end. "Like, there's the locker room where the proteins get put together, and then the tunnel, then they go out to do their thing. That's cool."

"Bro," Ransom says. "Did I actually, just, like, teach you some biology?"

Dex, for some reason, turns pink.

"No, it's cool," Ransom says, because there's a lurking happy-to-teach-you-some-more joke there that he can't make because he would actually mean it. "It's obviously just more interesting than your computer stuff."

"Tell yourself that's why you still don't understand any of it," Dex fires back, correctly understanding what kind of conversational overture Ransom was going for there. They chirp each other all the way back to the Haus.

*

"Hey," Chowder says in the kitchen, when Ransom has come down to raid the fridge. "You should talk to Dex."

"Whaf," Ransom says, reflexively shoving the slice of pie into his mouth before he can be told why he shouldn't eat it. "Hy yee?"

"I know you guys study together," Chowder says. "He's sad. Fix it."

Ransom can't point-blank say no to his goalie, and it seems unfair that Dex should be sad, when Ransom knows both his grades and his stats are doing well. He nods, shaking crumbs all down his shirt. Chowder rolls his eyes.

*

Dex doesn't seem particularly sad, to Ransom's eye, but Chowder would probably know better. Bitty would sit him down to pie, Holster would probably quote something, but Ransom just sets down the article he's not reading and asks, "Are you sad?"

Dex twitches a little, looks up from his laptop looking more nervous than sad. "No?"

"Chowder says," Ransom says.

"Maybe," Dex admits. "Nothing to worry about though."

"Oh, come on," Ransom says, curious and liking the way Dex's blush spreads under his freckles. "Talk it through for me."

"I have a crush," Dex mumbles. "Okay? Not a hockey problem or a school problem. Thus, not a problem."

"Bro!" Ransom says. "A crush isn't a problem. Or sad. Unless they're, like, taken, I guess, or not into you, but you can still enjoy the crush." Has he been doing that? He's pretty sure he isn't being weird about it, so probably. He can't really share that example with Dex though.

Dex looks down. His ears are still really brightly red. "I'm not really... good at that," he says. "The whole not taking things too seriously thing."

Ransom sighs. "You know Holster calls me a coral reef? It's okay to be delicate sometimes." He scoots a little closer to Dex. "Come on, tell me about it, you know it never seems so dire once you talk about it."

Dex looks quickly at him, then away. "Um," he says. "Just a crush. No interesting details."

"They must have a name or something. Wait, is it Jack? Everyone gets that crush at some point although I'm surprised you didn't get over it last year." Ransom catches himself. "But that is totally okay!" He puts his hand on Dex's shoulder. "We should get you laid, fastest way over it. I know lots of people?"

"It's not Jack," Dex says, kind of grumpily. "And I don't need - "

"Nursey," Ransom interrupts. "Bits."

"Why are you guessing team," Dex says. He squirms a little - Ransom still has his hand on his shoulder, which he should maybe take back. "Maybe it's a girl in the CS department."

"Cool, who?" Ransom says. "I just maybe got the impression from Chowder it was team-related somehow, I didn't mean to assume anything."

Dex knocks his fist against the table. "Okay, this is ridiculous," he says. "It's you, haha, I'm sorry - "

Ransom kisses him. Right there, on the second floor of Carnegie-Choate Science Library, with people all around them frowning at their lab notebooks and quizzing each other with flash cards, Ransom slides his hand to the back of Dex's neck and kisses him, and Dex kisses him back, and everything, for once, feels very calm and very clear.


End file.
